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Developmental psychLet’s pretend that you are a researcher who read the above st

ID: 3458609 • Letter: D

Question

Developmental psychLet’s pretend that you are a researcher who read the above study and wondered if there is somethiology researchers have previously found that newborns form a memory of their mothers’ faces and, in turn, develop a preference for looking at their own mother’s face over unfamiliar female faces within the first 36 hours of life.

Let’s pretend that you are a researcher who read the above study and wondered if there is something special about the mother’s face, or if newborns simply prefer to look at people who have interacted intimately with them. To investigate this, you decide to design a study that addresses the following question:

Do newborns prefer to look at their own mother’s face over their own father’s face?

Your Task Identify key aspects of the methodology that you could use to test this question. For each aspect that you identify, explain WHY this is important—that is, how does each given aspect help you accurately answer your research question?

Here are some hints to get you started... Some basic things to consider when designing a study:

Who will be your participant(s)?

What task(s) will you use?

How exactly will you set up the task? (e.g., physical set up, what stimuli you will present, how you will present the stimuli, how many times you will present the stimuli, etc.)

Some “bigger” questions to consider:

Let’s say that your hypothesis is that newborns will prefer to look at their own mother’s face over their own father’s face, given most newborns interact more with their mothers than their fathers in the first few hours of their lives. Is there anything you might want to do beyond the basic methodology in light of the rationale for your hypothesis?

Think about the possibility of not getting the outcome that you had hypothesised. What could be a potential explanation for this unexpected outcome? Is there anything you should make sure to do in your methodology to address this potential explanation? (i.e., foresee a problem with your methodology and do something to overcome this issue before you conduct your experiment!)

The question is that we need to design a study to about it.

Explanation / Answer

The key aspects in terms of the research methodology will be experimental research. This is so because as opposed to correlational methods and the likes, this aims to decipher a very direct connection and impact of one factor over another. This will help answer the given research question in terms of allowing the researcher to formulate a direct link between the newborn’s preference to look at the mother versus a stranger/unfamiliar face. The hypothesis in this case states that the newborn will in fact prefer to look at the mother’s face instead of an unfamiliar face in the initial days of his/her life. The participants will be a sample of at least 100 pairs of mothers and their newborns. In a controlled set up, the newborn will be exposed to the mother along with the father. The preference will thereby be recorded repeatedly upon many trials in ode to decipher whether this is a genuine response in order to be generalised or an occurrence by chance. In case the hypothesis is not met, the conclusion could be the fact that newborns in fact don’t innately have a preference to look at their mothers versus a stranger/less familiar face; however this preference/affiliation develops much later out of repeated natural/environment exposure.